Monthly Archives: August 2017

Recently, a friend was talking to me about how she is trying to end her service positively because she doesn’t want to look back at these two years as a black hole in her life. It made me think a lot about my experiences in my service and how I view them. With only a month of service left, now is the time for reflection and reframing! To start off, I don’t view my service entirely positively or negatively. I’ve had a lot of great experiences and a ton of bad ones, but that’s life. Who’s to say my last two years would have been any better if I hadn’t done Peace Corps. I don’t regret my service at all, but it’s extremely different from what I expected it to be.

I definitely thought Peace Corps was going to be hard. I expected a lot of homesickness, communication challenges, acclimation, cultural accommodation needs, and personal struggles, but I was also a naïve twenty-one-year-old (I’m still relatively naïve, just two years older), who thought that I had been through a lot of shit already and I was somehow invincible. I remember thinking that I didn’t have a breaking point and that I would be able to weather any storm. Don’t worry, I’ve been humbled quite a bit here. I’ve gotten closer to my breaking point than I’ve ever been before, but being the badass that I am, I did weather the storm and I’m still here. In this context, badass means with a lot of support from my friends and family and weeks of crying.

The things I didn’t expect from my service were the following: feeling unwanted, undervalued, underutilized, and disrespected; having my mental struggles continuously triggered and aggravated; feeling unsupported by my host organization and PC; and having medical issue after medical issue arise.

So, these are the negatives and they have royally sucked, but if I change them, I change all the growth and evolution that I’ve gone through to become who I am today. Life isn’t meant to be easy. Peace Corps is not meant to be easy. What would you learn from a life where everything just gets handed to you and you never fail? And what constitutes failing?

I’ve struggled a lot in the last few months with a feeling that I failed my service. I felt like I didn’t do everything that I expected to do and I didn’t build the relationships that I expected to build and somehow, that means I failed. I also fight with comparing myself to others. I look at my friends and see these great friendships they have, all the camps and projects they’ve done, and the amazing take-away they have. It’s easy to look at one thing they have that I don’t and say that means I failed my service. But there are so many factors into why they could cultivate these friendships and projects. Their successes are not a reflection of my failures.

A lot of my big take-aways from my service are personal. They’re things like making a lot of mental strides toward healing old wounds and insecurities. My successes are earning my master’s degree, applying to PhD programs (almost), and getting myself to a healthier place with food and activity. But I also have successes in my service. I made relationships with hundreds of students. I taught about topics like sex vs. gender, understanding different forms of sexual orientation, diversity and cultural tolerance and advocacy, and gender based violence; topics that would not have been taught otherwise. I resurrected a club and got 50+ kids interested in it. I showed kids what it’s like to be a strong, independent woman with no current interest in marriage or kids. I showed men every day that treating women like objects doesn’t always give you favorable attention. And I acted as a resource to Peace Corps and my host organization for diversity understanding and inclusion.

I would never be able to say that I wasted two years because I didn’t. I learned so much about myself and others. I learned more about diverse cultures and about my own. I taught others and myself how to be strong and independent. I changed my career paths (a few times) and started to recognize my true passions. My two years in Peace Corps were two of the hardest years of my life and I am absolutely ready to be done with my service, but I will always cherish this time as one of the biggest learning opportunities of my life. I’ve made a lot of progress on learning who I really am and how to love myself, and I think that is one of the hardest and most important lessons in life. So, no, I don’t just have a black hole where the last two years of where my life should be. I have a huge eclectic roller coaster of extremely high highs and terrifyingly low lows with a couple months of neutral territory thrown in. It’s not a roller coaster that I’m going to jump off and get back in line for, but it’s one that I will remember for the rest of my life.

Joiwyn

Disclaimer

The contents of this website are mine personally and do not reflect any position of the U.S. government or the Peace Corps.

Favorite Quotes

“You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You're on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who'll decide where to go...”
― Dr. Seuss, Oh, The Places You'll Go!

“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, Nothing is going to get better. It's not.”
― Dr. Seuss, The Lorax